The Great Backyard Bird Count has begun today, and continues through the 15th. My wife has been staring out the window all day, scribbling notes on paper, and I might have wondered what weirdness she’s up to, except that she just told me I should tell everyone in the world to join her. Not in our backyard, that would get crowded, but in your own backyard. I’m exempt, because she knows I only count spiders. And dinosaurs.
My usual morning routine.
I’m up at 4:30, and I don’t even have the excuse of going fishing. I’m just a jangly ball of stress right now, and also, we’ve got the bathroom taps open a little to prevent freezing, so all night long it’s drip-drip-trickle-gurgle, and it gets to you after a while. So I gave up trying to sleep and got up to get some work done and check my email.
Oh boy, the Noah’s Ark/DNA guy sent me more email about his “theory”.
On Rosh
Dear PZ Meyers,A few weeks ago, I sent you a copy of my theory on human genetics and Noah’s Ark. Today, I am sending you a second part to my theory that gives special attention to the Scythian Horse Riders that I believe descend from Rosh the son of Benjamin. The theory will only take a few minutes of your time and could dramatically alter your view of the world. Next week, I plan on uploading my theory to youtube and I hope that it will get a lot of views.
This is what he sent me.
Sorry, I’m not going to bother uploading the “figures”, which seem to be random images extracted from various publications. This is not a theory. This is a guy plucking something out of Bin A, the Bible, and something out of Bin B, various scientific publications he barely understands, and declaring “Ha ha! They fit!” even if they don’t.
My view of the world continues on unaltered, my idea that there are a lot of loons out there sadly unperturbed. Confirmed, even.
He might actually succeed and get a lot of views on YouTube, since the YouTube algorithm is undiscriminating, except in the sense it seems good at launching talentless hacks into bewildering heights of popularity.
Yeah, I’ve told the Noah’s Ark/DNA guy to go away and stop sending me his lunacy, but another property of the deeply delusional is that they can’t imagine you wouldn’t be interested in their ravings.
Back when I was a young man, the thing many college students chose to do over summer break was to sign on to a fishing boat (or a fish processing plant, which was less romantic) and spend the summer making great money at hard, cold, rather dangerous labor. I knew several of my fellows who did that at least once; I was tempted myself, but veered away at the notion of “hard work”. Physical labor? Me?
I think my younger brother might have been trying to show me up, because he signed on for a career in the North Pacific crab fishery. No, no way. That’s cold and scary.
But you know who I would not recommend such a job to? Any woman. It turns out the fishing boats, even the Canadian fishing boats, are hellish dens of sexual harassment, abuse, and assault.
You might not want to read the article at that link if you’re at all sensitive. Women who wanted to make the world better by signing on as observers on fishing boats — the people who tracked bycatch and were making sure the regulations were being followed — were being horrifically abused and pressured to ignore criminal activity, and often came back with absolutely no interest in continuing a career in fisheries biology.
There. Now you know what’s in it and don’t need to read it.
I will say, though, that there are a bunch of fishermen and fishing captains who need to be arrested and prosecuted, and there are laws that need to be changed to protect observers.
This year is trying to kill my interest in teaching. My work load has basically doubled, since I’m splitting up all my labs into multiple sub-sections to meet the isolation guidelines, and I’m also struggling to provide accommodations to all the students in difficult circumstances (which I need to do, and is part of the job), and my reward is that a) teaching involves trying to engage mute little black squares on a computer screen, and b) the administration occasionally mumbles about trying to find a way to cut my pay, while telling me gosh, what a wonderful job I’m doing. And then telling me we should prepare to continue the pandemic protocols next fall, and that we don’t have any access to a vaccine, and aren’t even remotely in the queue. Right now I’m staring into a growing bleak darkness that is my future. I don’t even have the joy of spidering right now — it’s -35 degrees C out there!
If my first year as a full time teaching professor (1990, but who is counting) had been like this, I’d be working in a software company right now, coding. I coulda been, but I liked students…you know, those entities who are now little black squares on a screen.
At least I can still scream into the glowing pixels of the void before me.
Once upon a time, every good little skeptic had a chart of the names of all of the logical fallacies, and dutifully memorized all the latin names because it was so cool to be able to interrupt an argument with an obscure-sounding label. So definitive. So potent. And the cocky smirk on your face was just the thing to attract a swarm of enamored suitors. It’s a phase, though, and most of us manage to grow out of it, eventually.
Especially since any idiot can do it, and do it badly. It stops being impressive when some ill-trained clown starts sputtering “fallacy, fallacy, fallacy!” at you in defense of some godawful stupid belief. A buffoon like Bodie Hodge, Ken Ham’s sycophantic son-in-law, for instance.
I cited an article before that creationism is representative of deep well of ignorance and conspiracy-thinking in America. I knew the original article would make someone at Answers in Genesis furious. It did! Oh boy, did it! And Bodie Hodge was the clown they had to use to rebut it! His rebuttal is basically Hodge screaming “FALLACY!” while constantly falling back on Young Earth Creationist dogma. So when Paul Braterman points out that creationism is dangerously opposed to science, Hodge shouts out:
This is an equivocation fallacy combined with an emotive language fallacy (yes, it is possible to do multiple fallacies of logic in one sentence!). First, the authors equivocate on the word “science.” We love science at Answer in Genesis. In fact, it was a young-earth creationist, Francis Bacon, who came up with the scientific method. And most fields of science were developed by Bible-believers! So clearly, believing in YEC is not “dangerously opposed to science.”
Therefore, the Earth is only 6,000 years old.
Did anyone observe or repeat the rock layers being laid down over millions of years? No. That is a religious claim from this author interpreting rock layers in the present assuming his naturalistic and humanistic religion.
God, unlike Prof. Braterman, was there and eye-witnessed it, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, revealed it to us in Scripture. So by what authority can Prof. Braterman oppose the absolute and supreme authority of God’s Word that there was indeed a flood that covered everything under the whole heavens (Genesis 7:19)? A lesser authority—thus, this is a faulty appeal to authority fallacy (i.e., a false authority fallacy).
Yeah, the whole thing goes on like that at tendentious length. He even rejects an appeal to authority by claiming his authority, God, is bigger than science’s authority.
Look, this is silly. Non-scientists don’t get to refute science by redefining science to fit their desires, as AiG does routinely. Science does involve the interpretation of the evidence, but the evidence keeps growing and going deeper and farther. Francis Bacon and any other natural historian before the middle of the 19th century did not have the volume of evidence we do now, and lacked the information to form a more thorough and accurate understanding of the history of the earth, but what they did is to honestly and sincerely work on gathering that evidence, which later scientists would be able to synthesize into better and better models of the world. Francis Bacon was aware that he lived with the traditions and conventions of his time, but he also wrote:
Men have sought to make a world from their own conception and to draw from their own minds all the material which they employed, but if, instead of doing so, they had consulted experience and observation, they would have the facts and not opinions to reason about, and might have ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the laws which govern the material world.
He understood that science was a cumulative process built on experience, observation, and experiment, that knowledge grows, that we can acquire new ideas and expand our understanding over time. He didn’t claim to know everything in that instant!
The reason Answers in Genesis is anti-science is that they have rejected the knowledge and evidence accumulated over centuries by people who also believed in the Bible, and the Koran, and various other holy books. The difference is that they did not turn their backs on all that we learned in order to deny anything that did not conform to their dogma.
It seems to be the considered opinion of a super-smart ex-president with a great brain, a lot of Republican senators, and a host of well-paid lawyers, so it must be true!
So all I have to do is rob my bank and dart out the door, and then I’m scot-free? If I try it, you’ll all quote Ayn Rand and various billionaires in my defense, right?
Rebecca Watson makes a good point in this video, that we shouldn’t overlook the failings of those who put themselves in the same group as us. She takes a few potshots at familiar targets, like Bill Maher, but focuses in on Naomi Wolf. Wolf is terrible — I remember wondering what the hell was wrong with Bill Clinton, that he appointed her to be his advisor on women’s issues. For me, it was the first crack in the facade, and hoo boy, did all the flaws in that man come pouring out.
Lately, Wolf has come out as a dangerous proponent of pandemic pseudoscience, as Rebecca explains.
Also noteworthy is this comment from Lipzig Schweitzer.
Just as an aside, my younger brother is a deeply conservative Mormon public school English teacher, and he uses Naomi Wolfe books as a teaching tool for how stupid the feminist movement is. The admin let it fly because they think, due to her “reputation” that he’s teaching the exact opposite lesson. She’s being weaponized against you, THAT’S how stupid she is and how crucial community self- policing is. And believe me, he’s not smart enough to come up with this lesson plan on his own, someone he’s listening to told him to do this because on his own, he’d never have even known her name. He did not seek out controversial characters to demonize
That’s how bad Naomi Wolf is.
The students are free to suck on flies all hour long!
Which reminds me…I have to go open the fly lab right now.
You know what’s nice? My in-box and Twitter feed are no longer filled with noise about Donald Trump. I have no interest in watching the current impeachment proceedings, which will be full of posturing airheads and bad lawyers making arguments in bad faith. I get a brief distillation of all stupid chatter in the morning, and then I ignore it the rest of the day. It feels good!
So the impeachment trial began yesterday. It went badly for the ol’ orange asshole, with the senate deciding that sure, they could go ahead and impeach him. That’s about it. Now the question is whether they’ll actually do it.
The Democrats are decisive (there’s a phrase I never thought I’d write): yes, they will.
The Republicans are in a dither. What they do is not going to depend on their conscience, or an objective assessment of the evidence, but entirely on the basis of the polling, because they’re all amoral conniving cowards. A substantial number of Republican voters are still in the Cult of Trump, so they’re afraid that voting to impeach will trigger an angry backlash against them…but at the same time, they’re concerned that the ongoing prosecution is going to make such a strong public case that they’ll get a backlash if they don’t vote to impeach. Squirm, you creeps, squirm. I hope they’re all sweating profusely right now.
As for Trump himself, the reports are mixed. The New York Times says he’s furious.
On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the angriest, Mr. Trump “was an eight,” one person familiar with his reaction said.
And while he was heartened that his other lawyer, Mr. Schoen, gave a more spirited performance, Mr. Trump ended the day frustrated and irate, the people familiar with his reaction said.
I’m a terrible person who likes to hear that the ex-president is suffering, but it is the NYT, and I do not trust the NYT. The Washington Post says something different: he’s sanguine.
But Trump’s seeming quietude, said one confidant who recently spoke with the former president, is less the result of newfound discipline and more a consequence of Twitter’s decision to ban Trump, who no longer has an instant public forum to blast out his latest grievances.
Both papers conclude, unfortunately, that the impeachment is not likely to succeed, so maybe he’s got good reason to relax. About the trial, at least. His financial empire is crumbling around him and he’s got a future of lawsuits to shred his declining years.
That’s a wrap. Now I have to think about genetics all day long.
